HK piter wrote:
5DR seems pretty high for a car, actually.
Standard bumpers can withstand a 2.5 mph impact with a wall without damage, so for a 53 hp vehicle that's (1.25 * 53 / 100) = 0.66 dice = 1d-1 or 1d-2, and it's basically going to be never damaged, so DR 4-5 isn't crazy, at least for the bumpers themselves; the rest of the front might be DR 1-2. This may mostly be a problem with the collision rules, though.
I'm not sure what sedan would have 53 hp, as that implies a weight of 2300 lb or so. 60 hp (3,375 lb) is probably more realistic for a sedan. However, that doesn't actually matter that much.
For a 1,500 kg ground vehicle hitting a wall, energy at 2.5 mph (1.12 m/s) is 940J, so we can probably assume the bumper is capable of handling a kilojoule impact.
Now, if instead we hit a 68 kg human while moving at 16.67 m/s, pre-collision KE is 208.4 kJ. After collision, velocity of combined system is 16.67 * (1500 / 1568) = 15.95 m/s, KE is 199.4 kJ, so the total energy in the collision is 9 kJ, which we can expect to cause significant damage to the car.
From my own experience this does indeed sound right... provided the car was not one of the tin coffins that people drive these days but a real car, made properly.
Actually, a modern car with passenger compartment reinforcement and crumple zones provides superior protection to the occupants -- the crumple zone absorbs much of the impact, and then you have passenger compartment reinforcement that occurs after a lot of energy has already been dissipated. Oddly enough, it also does somewhat less damage to what you hit -- the basic point of the crumple zone is to take damage so that more important things don't have to.
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